


Relieved, Not Understood

by lordy_lou



Series: Interim [2]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/M, episode 103, went from angry makeouts to sad makeouts so we're movin on up in the world
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-23
Updated: 2018-07-23
Packaged: 2019-06-15 07:10:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15407712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lordy_lou/pseuds/lordy_lou
Summary: Vax is dead and Pike cannot sleep, so she is hanging from a tree branch by her knees in the Feywild.  Somehow, this makes sense to her: Stringbean has been reduced to ash, Vex and Keyleth are breaking and Percy is attempting to hold the both of them together, and there’s a wanna-be-god—no, God—who’s warped himself to the Prime Material plane.  May as well turn herself upside down.  Fuck all else makes sense right now.(Or: Pike and Scanlan in the Shademirk.)





	Relieved, Not Understood

_fallow from the loss of sun, the fields turn into spoil._

_we sought along the arid plains for food left in the soil._

 

* * *

 

Vax is dead and Pike cannot sleep, so she is hanging from a tree branch by her knees in the Feywild.Somehow, this makes sense to her: Stringbean has been reduced to ash, Vex and Keyleth are breaking and Percy is attempting to hold the both of them together, and there’s a wanna-be-god—no, God—who’s warped himself to the Prime Material plane.May as well turn herself upside down.Fuck all else makes sense right now.

Grog is not in a tree—he’d claimed he was too big to _not_ hurt a tree, and he didn’t want to do that, not when Keyleth pissed off grass last time—so he’s nestled himself at the trunk in the soft, curling mist.He’s snoring just a little, and Pike cannot help but smile.At least he made it out alive.The leaves all around are a deep purple, fading to midnight blue, fading to black.

Vax.Stringbean.Vex is still in shock.Keyleth is desperately planning with… some sort of esoteric spell.They need a damn big diamond.

Pike swings herself back and forth.She has brought her friends back from the dead before, and each time it’s a gamble, it’s a hope, it’s a painful prayer.But she cannot bring back what isn’t there.She hasn’t got that magic.Vax was fucking _disintegrated_ , and Scanlan had done his best to scoop up the ashes, but that wasn’t enough.

She can’t do the one thing that keeps her valuable beyond friendship, and there’s a part of her heart that burns at the thought.Vax is gone.Her eyes burn too.

Her armor clanks as she swings, and her gauntlets clank as she wipes away a damnable tear, and Grog lets out a gigantic _snnnrk_ that has her giggling for a breath in the absurdity.At least he’ll be fine.He’ll always be fine.He’s Grog, he’s her best friend, and he’s unstoppable.Thank Sarenrae.

“Pike?” she hears hissed across the earring.She watches as Grog twitches, and hears minute rustling in the other treetops, and a muffled curse.

“I know you left, Scanlan,” says Percy—before she could say anything, but he’d always been quick— “but you should at least remember this isn’t a one-way channel.”Then he stops speaking into the earring, and Pike hears gentle whispering from the adjacent treetop, and she supposes it must nice to have someone to calm you back to sleep in your grief.She wipes her face.

Then, again, her name.But this time it’s from a few trees away, and it’s in Gnomish, all highland hasty and lilting.Sarenrae help her, there’s something comforting about it.

Grog shifts in his sleep as if by reflex.That man and his gnomes.She cannot hold back a smile, because her heart is breaking but she has this rock of a friend.This, at least, cannot change.

“What?” Pike says back, also in Gnomish, pitching the whisper to where she’d heard her name.“What do you need?”

“Do you have any more healing spells left in you?” Scanlan responds quickly.“Or herbs or something?”

She’s silent for a bit.For some reason, after the cave, she’d thought… never mind.She could at least do this for her friend.Acquaintance?Fellow gnome?Then, her treacherous mind: _someone I could love very much._

Friend.Friend seems safe, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

“Pike?” she hears again.“You okay?”Percy coughs pointedly, and Pike ignores him.

She shakes her head.“Yeah, yeah,” she says.“I’m fine,” she says, and lets her arms hang down until she can almost brush the top of Grog’s bald head.“I’m fine.”

After another breath, Pike hears a tiny _thmp_ and watches, upside-down, as Scanlan shimmies (there’s no other word for it, she thinks, not when he just… wiggles his hips like that) down his tree and creeps across the feathery grass. 

He tiptoes to her tree, and tilts his head at the sight she’s created: topsy-turvy gnome, hanging from her knees, stretching her fingers out as long as she can get them in order to poke a sleeping goliath.She knows she looks ridiculous, especially in the context of current events, and so Pike pins Scanlan with a blank stare, daring him to comment.

Before, he would have taken that dare.Now, Scanlan simply returns the look. 

“Can I come up?” he whispers.The skin around his left eye is puffy and red, and his blinks are coming too slow.

“I thought you just wanted a spell,” she says.Her voice is quiet, but there’s something defiant in her that refuses to whisper to Scanlan, refuses to stay silent.“I could have cast it from here.”

“You told me you were fine twice in a row,” he shoots back, and she racks her memory.Oh shit.

“Maybe I’m really that fine,” she says, reaching her arms just a little longer.So close to Grog’s head.She focuses on that for a hot second, before she sees Scanlan shake his head out of the corner of her eye.He winces as he does so, the movement seeming to shake his soreness into full awareness.

“I’ve told that lie before.”

She stops reaching, and closes her eyes. 

Pike knows she is not an excellent liar.She knows Scanlan is the best liar she’s ever met.She also knows that the truth can be used like a blade.

“Maybe I’m not fine, Scanlan,” she says, finding his (lovely, warm, sad) eyes and locking in.“What are you going to do about it?”

(Here is the reason behind Pike’s soul.She is gentle, yes, but she is not Grog’s best friend for nothing.She is shot through with threads of anger, all buried in her warp and weft, and she holds her hurts in and only releases them with Sarenrae’s guidance.She loves her goddess for this, because she knows in her heart of heart that forgiveness and renewal are the things that keep the world going, but it is still a war of hateful attrition when her personal feelings are involved.

Sometimes she solves this problem by locking off a bit of herself, but this doesn’t always work.It’s like Vex had said: the ones closest to you can hurt you the worst. 

Oh Vex, oh Vex.Her closest one has left.Oh _Vex_.)

This new Scanlan once again says nothing.Instead, he oh-so-carefully steps from Grog’s knee to elbow to shoulder—lightfooted enough that Grog doesn’t even stir, he’s gotten sneakier—and reaches his hands towards hers.They don’t touch, not yet.

“Care to give me a lift, Pikey?”Then there’s that old smile as Pike considers pushing him off of Grog and waking up the entire camp, but instead she grabs his tan wrists—and—

heaves

hurls

—and Scanlan goes a little deeper into the tree than either gnome expects.He manages to stay quiet despite the odd landing, except for the hissed Gnomish expletive.

Percy coughs once again, louder this time.Again, Pike ignores him, and curls herself upwards to sit on the branch proper in order to watch Scanlan wriggle his way down from the canopy. 

“You don’t have any problems going down,” she says.

“With you? Never,” he replies instantly, his eyebrows waggling for a moment before he realizes what he’s said.He then clamps his lips shut and she watches the wheels turn in his head.“Climbing up my tree earlier gave me a headache. Eye-ache. Face-ache. Climbing down’s not so bad.”He walks gingerly onto her branch.“May I sit?”

Pike shrugs, and he seems to take this as a yes and so settles himself next to her, hip just barely brushing her own. 

“So you’re not fine,” he says.He isn’t looking straight at her, but instead he’s staring down at Grog and his gaze is miles away.“That’s… to be expected, after today.”

“Yeah,” she says.“On the other hand, I didn’t try to pull out my own eyeball, so maybe we’re on even ground with being not-fine.”There is a fine bioluminescence beneath the bark of the tree, and its soft glow plays off the planes of his cheeks, shines across his scar and the swollen flesh of the left half of his face.

She swings a leg over the branch, straddling it and facing his side.He turns his head to look at her fully, and she can’t meet his eyes.Instead, she puts her hand on his cheek and pumps a healing spell through and in the back of her head, she hears Sarenrae hum with approval as some of Scanlan’s swelling goes down.

“Thanks,” Scanlan whispers. 

There’s something he’s been doing recently: he looks at her more often.It’s not lascivious like it was before, or blindly worshipping or desperate to impress.Instead, it’s slow.It’s considering. 

After she’d given him a hickey in a cave full of death, it’d shifted to something heavy.

(He is too handsome, as always: face not perfectly put together, not coldly noble like Percy or wide-eyed and shining like Keyleth, not aquiline and fierce like the twins (like only Vex, now), not rugged like Grog, not compact and scarred like her.He has big eyes, a big mouth, and dimples that show when he actually laughs but not when he’s lying with his smile.But it’s the sheer vitality and confidence that runs through him almost all the time—his damnable force of personality—that colors him nigh-irresistible.

He is, of course, _very charming._ )

Her hand is still on his face, and she feels all of her thoughts press up her throat, swelling through her tongue, and she knows that she feels but she can’t name everything swirling within her.There’s pain, there’s grief, there’s shock, but there’s still hope and other things she refuses to really think about.

“Scanlan,” she says, and moves her hand to the back of his neck and pulls his forehead to hers.“You showed up three days ago. We found out a god is ascending on the Prime Material plane, and we just lost Vax and got our asses handed to us.”She is pressing her head to his, and there’s a small shift as he swings his legs to straddle the branch along with her.

When he speaks, it’s pitched low and he’s still speaking Gnomish and that part of her heart warms just a bit more.“I tried to scoop my eye out and one of my best friend’s ashes are in my pocket.”Carefully, slowly, he rolls his forehead against hers, a dizzying movement of skin upon skin.“Also, I wasn’t allowed to turn Trinket into diamond, so there’s a lifelong dream that’s been crushed.” 

“All in all, it’s been a pretty shitty day, huh?” Pike says.Her hand moves from his neck to his back, and she scoots him towards her.He lets her without any resistance. 

Scanlan is very quiet, and the only reason she can tell that he’s nervous is because his breath is coming quickly.“Very shitty,” he agrees,“but we’ll have time to make plans tomorrow.”His voice is cold and serious for a second, and then he smiles.“We have a god to kill, I guess.”

In the glow from beneath the bark his eyes are half-lidded and wet and his smile is weathered at the edges, and she feels almost guilty.

He knows how he feels.She has a good idea of how he feels, too.She… doesn’t know how she feels.

Well, no.She knows how she feels, but she doesn’t want to say it.Vax is dead and there’s a fetal god and no, damn her, that’s another excuse and a bad one at that.She’s scared.

The ones closest to you can hurt the most.She knows this.But Scanlan has changed enough—not altogether—that maybe if she lets him in, him leaving in the future won’t be the earth-rending thing that it was before.If she can have him and let him leave instead of the half-hold she’d once carried with her, maybe it’ll be less.Let roots grow deep and singular instead of shallow and wide, like a strong tree on the windswept plains by Westruun.

Her holy symbol is warm on her chest, and she hears Scanlan humming a soft song—an old tune, a Gnomish tune she can just barely remember from when she lived with J.B.—and he gently puts his hands on her hips.

“Is this okay?” he whispers.“Just—just to—” and gods, she remembers how tongue-tied he gets, how tongue-tied they both get, and she can’t help but to smile at the memory of his old proposal.Pike nods against him, and lifts her hips to let him pull her closer until they are pressed together on the branch, her arms wrapping around him as his fingers slowly rub circles in the gaps of her plate mail at her hips.Soft touches on her leathers echo down to her skin and by the gods, it is a good fit. 

Their legs tangle around the branch and she takes a deep breath as his clever fingers find the latches for her breastplate.“Is this okay?” he repeats, and she nods again, whispering a _yes_ before she can give herself time to think twice.Together, they shift off her upper armor and quietly place it in the fork a nearby branch, but it’s hard to think much when he’s so close to her, when he’s so singular in his focus.He takes her hand and walks her to the heart of the tree, to a circle of boughs—the Shademirk’s gratitude from so long ago—and gently pulls her to the nested branches.

He asks for a third time, and Pike gives her answer when she tugs him to her side the makeshift floor and his eyes are wide, blown out, wet in the glow, and she brings his face back to hers.When she kisses him, his lips are soft and hungry and she tastes salt.She pulls away for a moment, and his hands on her back clutch her closer, like he’s afraid she’ll be the one to leave this time.

Scanlan’s eyes are damp, but it’s not the faint silver trails on his cheeks that she sees first—he’s trained on her face, she realizes, and the final knowledge that he is still fixated on her is some kind of wonderful constant that breaks her completely.

His forehead presses back against hers again and they share the same breaths: hers, hitching and stuttering silently, and his quick and even. 

It is a good fit, she thinks as they sink through grief, as they fall into some semblance of sleep.It is a good fit.

 

* * *

 

_don’t recoil back in silence._

_all that i ask is just a couple of seconds_

_in private._

**Author's Note:**

> "this campaign ended a long while ago and this was a comparatively minor pairing. better write fic about it." --my idiot brain.
> 
> title and interstitial text form Shanty Song by Bruce Peninsula. comments and kudos are appreciated.


End file.
